Orlando Actress Blends Storytelling And Stagecraft

Theater Review

A Familiar Face To Theater Audiences, Christine Decker Is The Heroine Of The Heart-wrenching Molly Sweeney .

January 3, 1999|By Elizabeth Maupin, Sentinel Theater Critic

She has played a wary queen and a wisecracking psychiatrist, a troubled mother and a long-suffering wife.

Once she was a mildly dotty Midwestern retiree who wanted to be shot into space. Once she was a comical caricature of a Mexican spitfire run amok.

Now Christine Decker is playing the title character in Orlando Theatre Project's new production, Molly Sweeney, which opens at Seminole Community College's Fine Arts Theatre Thursday night.

And this role, too, may be one she was born to play.

``When Christine sits down to tell you a story, she takes you there,'' says Jim Howard, who is directing her in Molly Sweeney. ``She has that ability to transport you.''

For Orlando Theatre Project's audiences, Decker's might be the most familiar face they have come to know. From All My Sons and Wild Oats in 1994 to Defying Gravity and Molly Sweeney this season, Decker has acted in nine productions for OTP. (She was Equity stage manager for a tenth, The Little Prince.)

She is also experienced with the works of Molly Sweeney's playwright, Brian Friel, who is widely acknowledged as Ireland's greatest living playwright. For Oldcastle Theatre Company in Burlington, Vt., she played Maggie in Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa and Trish in his Wonderful Tennessee. Molly is the third of Friel's women she has portrayed.

They are roles, Decker says, toward which she gravitates.

``I'm enchanted by him,'' she says. ``Other than [American writer) Lee Blessing, I can't think of a male playwright who writes so well about female characters. He seems to understand them, but he doesn't patronize. His work is a perfect blend of concept and emotion. His language is so colloquial but so brilliantly chosen. Nothing is careless.''

In Molly Sweeney, Decker shares the stage with two other OTP veterans, Chris Pfingsten and Kristian Truelsen, and their three voices combine to tell Molly's story.

The title character is a blind woman whose husband, Frank, presses her into having an operation to restore her sight. A once-famous doctor, Mr. Rice, adds his recollections, too, to the throng of memories that show what Molly was and what she becomes.

The play, similar to Friel's earlier work The Faith Healer, is written as a series of monologues, which in this piece overlap and interrupt to tell the tale.

``It's Irish storytelling,'' Decker says. ``The characters are not speaking to each other, but they're somehow commenting on what the other has said. It's like orchestrated music.''

The sometimes comic, often heart-wrenching drama of Molly Sweeney is far from the kind of theater that Decker, 47, came to Orlando to perform. As an actor in Minneapolis and later in Arizona, she worked heavily in improvisational comedy, and she moved to Central Florida in 1990 to perform at the Comedy Warehouse at Disney's Pleasure Island.

Only when she became involved with OTP - in 1994 with Arthur Miller's All My Sons - did Decker return to what she thinks of as her roots as a dramatic actor.

Still, she says, she hopes potential audiences realize there is plenty of humor in Brian Friel.

``What I find so exciting about theater is it doesn't have to define itself one way or the other. It has both drama and comedy.

``In Friel, the humor is a love of the human spirit. The character of Frank [in Molly Sweeney) is almost comic relief. Without being a caricature, he's almost an Irish archetype, and he's able to laugh at himself.

``In Wonderful Tennessee, my character always said the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment. Until we went into rehearsal, I didn't realize how funny she was.''

There are other ways, too, director Howard says, that Decker's experience as an improv performer helps her with this show.

``The play is not told in linear fashion,'' he says. ``It jumps about in time. She knows how to make that shift in terms of immediately focusing your attention where it needs to be.''

Yet Decker says that, despite her experience, playing Molly presents a new array of challenges.

``I felt pretty confident about being an actor,'' she says. ``And then this came along at the perfect time - playing somebody who is blind, who can see and then can't. You don't have that current of energy between you and the other person. I try to think of looking not out but at the back of my head.

``There's the challenge that she has no vision but it's psychological. And then there's how to let all of that not get into the way of the really important stuff. I'm still trying to put it all together.''

Decker calls Truelsen and Pfingsten, her fellow actors, a ``dream cast'' - one, in fact, that she suggested, without her own name attached, when OTP was choosing its season. Her long experience with the Oldcastle company in Vermont, where she still performs, has led her to appreciate the pool of actors here.